


The message in the house on fire

by faceofstone



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: M/M, Pining and also too late to do anything about it... maybe, Post Season 2, Potentially Meaningful Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 02:38:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9695981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone
Summary: The problem is that Harry doesn't do dreams. Harry is the worst person for this job.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bold_seer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bold_seer/gifts).



This is what Harry says, when he is out tending to his chickens in the cold misty mornings, or stubbornly sitting at the Roadhouse's counter with the sole company of his beer: if he were here and Harry were there, they would stand a chance. Just one, maybe, as it's a tough job and nobody’s pulled it off before. But one's better than naught and they would make it count.

Thing is, a country Sheriff (the badge still weighs on his jacket even when it feels like he resigned in another age, when the air was crisp and the world was younger) is no bright, sharp Dale Cooper with galaxies in his eyes, leaving the shadows of two worlds in his wake. His dreams are simple. They begin and end in the darkness of the woods outside Twin Peaks.

 

“Acetylcholine neurons fire high-voltage impulses into the forebrain,” Dale said, his voice impossibly soft, in a distant morning encased in amber. “Impulses become pictures,” he continued, lost in a world of his own, which now feels like an omen of what was to come, because sometimes hindsight is perfect and sometimes it's just drunk and sad, and exactly none of that explained how he reached out to Laura Palmer's cry for help. Or instructions on how to replicate that feat.

He said many things, he did. One night, it was early on, must've still been February and they were passing through the gazebo on their way to an early donuts run, he stopped right in his tracks to share a sudden thought: “Isn't it incredible, Harry, how humanity has always felt pulled to the moon? Nights like this, it's a luminous field that connects us.”

“I read that we all come from stars,” Harry offered, furrowing his eyebrows. Coop's smile made him believe it.

Later on, mid-March, lethargic rainy afternoon in the woods, the tail end of a discourse Harry missed because he thought he'd spotted a mountain finch: “...it is easy to make like the rain on the lake, but dangerous, I believe.”

Whatever that meant, whatever any of that meant, it worked for him. If Harry were lost in a strange other world, Dale would listen to his call, part the curtains and pull him out and that's a fact. Too bad Harry's dumb head can't hear a thing. There are no curtains in his dreams, just the woods. Foxes screaming in the night, the secret blossoming of mushrooms, paths that don't exist by day.

 

Tonight, atop the familiar, pointless, looping darkness, a house is burning. Harry follows a meandering path up the mountainside, following its hairpin turns up and up for months and years on end, long past the summit of Blue Pine mountain, which looked as high up as heaven when he was a kid.

In the future, when the ground is pressed under the weight of his feet and his legs can't carry him anymore, he makes it to the clearing at the top, where the house, his beacon, has never stopped burning. Dale Cooper is still standing under the scorching archway, young, dark and somber like the day he left, and he gestures for him to come inside. So he does.

The hall is engulfed by flames. Coop welcomes him in an embrace like a lover's, intimately pressing his body against his as fire laps at their clothes.

With the saddest lopsided smile, he leans in to whisper: “the unlit azure surface of a donut”. Harry turns to look at his lips and kisses them, softly, like he should have done before it was too late; he tastes of coffee, oil and blueberry compote. The flames consume him. Coop doesn't let go and neither does he. The house burns down.

 

.

 

Sitting under a row of painted palm trees, Jacoby, ever so erudite and ever so pompous, tells him that the house, any house, the idea of a house, is a symbol for a man's life. He tells him that a fire that destroys expresses the anxieties - he accompanies this with a gesture of his hands that reminds Harry of a tired fish, like a salmon fed up with modern life - that go along with unwanted changes forced by circumstances. But in the Chinese tradition, he adds, fire is more likely to represent a burning, positive, transformative love or passion, at which point Harry stops listening, because he is not Chinese, Jacoby certainly isn't either, and Josie, who was Chinese, never seemed happy when she dreamed of fires taking the mill, the lakes, the rich fabrics in her wardrobe. 

Harry dares not mention the kiss. It doesn't take a medical degree to sort that one out by himself, anyway.

 

So he goes back to feeding his clucking ladies, or to sitting alone at the Roadhouse's counter, and he tells himself that if Dale were here in his stead, then maybe, just maybe, they would stand a chance.

**Author's Note:**

> (all the stuff that sounds like random nonsense was actually carefully thought through, promise!)


End file.
